The Thirty-Nine Steps

Aug24

David Stuart Davies looks at the first modern spy thriller.

‘I have long cherished an
affection for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the ‘dime
novel’, and which we know as the ‘shocker’ — the romance where the incidents
defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.’

John Buchan

John Buchan’s The
Thirty-Nine Steps was the first and one of the best modern spy thrillers to
be published in the twentieth century. It embodies many of the ideas, motifs
and themes that were to be taken up by other writers in the field who came
along after Buchan, including Sapper with the Bulldog Drummond stories,
Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, and Ian Fleming and his James Bond
novels.

The Thirty-Nine Steps was written in
1914, the year Britain entered the Great War, and published in 1915. The novel
had the advantage of not only being a compulsive page-turner with a satisfying
racy pace but at the time it was also extremely topical. Buchan plays upon the
British patriotism of the period and, to a certain extent, with the anti-German
feeling, which ran high in the first years of the war. The fact that the action
of the novel is premised on ‘real-life’ events that Buchan’s readership would
recognise from the reporting of the war gives the often improbably fortuitous
turn of events that contribute to Hannay’s ultimate success some plausibility.

Buchan’s
choice to locate the scene of the action in Scotland, with the hero Richard Hannay
adventuring across the Galloway hills and meeting with various colourful
Borders characters, added colour and romance to the novel. In this, Buchan was
probably drawing on his Scottish literary predecessors, Robert Louis Stevenson
and Walter Scott. Indeed, his lyrical description of the Scottish scenery,
capturing the sweep and grandeur of the highlands is one of the great pleasures
of the book.

Because of the
uncluttered nature of the plot and the use of the Scottish locale for most of
the chase sequences – a locale which has changed little in the intervening
years since the book was written – The Thirty-Nine Steps still appears
fresh and appealing to the modern reader. Richard Hannay is an exotic outsider,
a colonial entrepreneur, and one who, crucially, does not operate within the
socially defined parameters of the public-school network, aristocracy or the
political intelligentsia. In essence Hannay is everyman, a bored Englishman
wishing something would happen. And then it does. When he thinks he is likely
to die of boredom, he is entrusted indirectly with a task which must be carried
out by him alone to ensure the security of Britain. Every shadow is to be
feared, every face to be doubted and every promise to be mistrusted. In
south-west Scotland Hannay is a stranger in a strange land being hunted by an
unseen enemy, but in countryside very familiar to many of his readers of
yesterday and today. It is by these techniques that Buchan creates and
maintains the taut suspense that exists throughout the whole book. We travel
with Hannay at speed to Scotland,
back to London
and then to the coast and like him we do not know what to expect. What better
way is there for a writer to persuade the reader to continue reading?

Having extolled the virtues of the book as
an out and out thriller, one must also note that The Thirty-Nine Steps
carries quite a bit of the baggage of the detective story with it as well. Like a sleuth hound Hannay tackles
cryptograms, shows himself excellent in disguise, and wrestles with the
tantalising clue embedded in the title. Despite his claim that he is no
Sherlock Holmes, Hannay makes deductions from clues given to him by the spy
Scudder. In fact as a character type he is a new concept altogether: a
physically active thriller hero facing the challenge of intellectual exertion
because he has been thrown into the role of a detective. Hannay makes time and
space for a detective’s contemplations – deductive moments when he can mull
over events and puzzles - by getting onto a train and sleeping in the heather,
but he is continually shunted out of these reflective spaces by the imperative
of pursuit. Buchan’s genius lay in combining these two elements into an
effective unity. In fact it could be claimed that with The Thirty-Nine Steps
he created a new genre on the fiction map.
‘The literary innkeeper’ character sums it up well, when having been
told an embroidered version of Hannay’s story, he exclaims ‘My God! It is all
pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle’. And
indeed Buchan does combine the best of both of these authors, creating a narrative
that lies somewhere between an adventure yarn and a detective story.

Those who come
to the novel after watching the 1935 film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock are surprised
that there is no attractive blonde handcuffed to our hero Hannay (Robert
Donat), making them inseparable as they flee from the baddies and find
themselves in various amusing risqué situations. Buchan wasn’t very good on sex
or, indeed, humour which Hitchcock quite effectively injected into his take on
the novel. However, again we have to
remember the nature of the period when the novel was offered up to the public.
Buchan wrote the story when male authors rarely featured women as main
characters involved in dramatic action. They were wives, girlfriends or mothers
and watched from the sidelines. War and spy work was men’s business and this
was reflected in the plotting.

There have been
two other film versions. The 1959 movie starring Kenneth More was presented in
a contemporary setting, but the movie made in 1978 with Robert Powell in the
lead placed the action in the correct period – although this adaptation did
feature a preposterous finale with Hannay dangling from the face of Big Ben. In
the 1980s Powell played the part again in a television series called Hannay.
There was an interesting BBC TV version with Rupert Penry Jones as Hannay in
2008, but when this wasn’t relying on Hitchcock’s additions, it played around
with the original plot.

In 2007 a
light-hearted spoof of The Thirty-Nine Steps did very good business in
London’s West End, receiving enthusiastic reviews. One might use the old cliché
which observes that there is life in the old dog yet. And why not? The source
material still works as a first class thriller that not only holds the
attention, but also raises the pulse rate at key moments. While wearing proudly
the venerable title of ‘classic’, The Thirty-Nine Steps still remains a
lively, effective and enjoyable read.